Author: Michael Witthaus

Sculpture curious

Andres Institute of Art month-long symposium opens

“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it,” is a quote often attributed to Michaelangelo, who also said when talking about a particular piece of work, “I saw the angel in the marble and carved until I set him free.”

Such made manifest spirit is present as one wanders through the sculpture park at Andres Institute of Art in Brookline, taking in the many works on display there. The experience comes with the cost of a donation, but that’s not mandatory, Institute co-founder John Weidman explained by phone recently.

“You shouldn’t have to pay to hear a bird sing, or look at art,” he said.

Weidman, a master sculptor, opened the Institute in 1998 with its namesake, philanthropist Paul Andres. The next year the first sculpture symposium happened, and it’s been an annual event ever since, apart from a two-year pandemic hiatus. The next one opens on Sept. 12, with three sculptors from Cuba, Syria and Japan, who are all now U.S.-based.

For three weeks each will create a new addition to Andres’s sculpture park while welcoming onlookers to observe their works in progress. The theme for this year’s event is Curiosity. “Which is the driving thing of just about everybody, but especially artists,” Weidman said. “Because you want to see what’s next, and it’s a learning process.”

Grandeur is eschewed for “good designs,” Weidman continued, adding that past artists have adapted to those guidelines in inventive ways. “Some we’ve had normally did very large works, 40 feet high and so on … one in particular had never worked in stone, and he learned to … on a 6-foot figure, and just had a very good time with it.”

This year’s sculptors reflect the gathering’s Bridges and Connections moniker, but selection in 2026 was challenging. “Normally we try to have two from afar and one more local, but it’s been difficult to get artists from overseas,” Andres President Kristi St. Laurent said by phone. “This time we have three sculptors with very distinct cultural heritages.”

Havana-born Fermin Castro now lives in Somerville. His artist statement describes a style that extends from his Caribbean roots and is “influenced by master visual artists and Afro-Cuban sculptors, connecting both primitive and modern Latin American and African artistic expression.”

Castro works in a figurative, imaginative artistic motif that treats form itself as a kind of speech. “Sculpture originated as a primal representation of language, in which form and volume were manifested in this genuine act of human expression,” he writes in bold type on his website. Two of his more evocative pieces were carved from a tree trunk and a deceased elm.

Dankha Zomaya, an Assyrian now living in Illinois, is a returning sculptor at this year’s symposium. Zomaya first came to the park for the 2022 gathering, where he created a pair of goats. The two abstract metal animals are a permanent part of, in St. Laurent’s words, “The Hill.”

Also a painter as well as a multidisciplinary sculptor comfortable across wood, stone, bronze, direct metal, and copper, Zomaya has built a career participating in international sculpture symposia around the world. His return four years after his first residency offers a chance for visitors to see how an artist’s relationship with the park evolves.

Okinawa-born Marin Murakoshi makes her works in a Concord, Mass., facility called Studio 凸凹. The characters translate as “dekoboko” or “bumpy, lumpy, or irregular,” which Murakoshi has offered as something close to a working definition of sculpture itself.

Her practice spans stone and wood carving alongside creations built from recycled and reclaimed materials which includes an ongoing body of work called the “Rubbish Revival Project.” Ranging from precise traditional carving to resourceful reuse makes Murakoshi one of the more unpredictable additions to this year’s symposium lineup.

Those looking to get involved are encouraged to sign up on the Andres website for patronage opportunities.

“Bring a bottle of wine, sit down for two hours at dinner, really get to know the sculptors,” St. Laurent said. “Hear about their different adventures with symposia all over the world, works they’ve created, people they’ve met, and some of their favorite experiences. It’s just really an extension of the whole Bridges and Connections idea.”

Bridges and Connections Sculpture Symposium
When: Saturday, Sept. 12 – Sunday, Oct. 4
Where: Andres Institute of Art, 106 Route 13, Brookline
More: andresinstitute.org/aia-symposium

Featured photo: Attendees at a previous festival. Courtesy photo.

Present at the creation

Peter Asher tells stories ahead of The Fixx and Zombies singer Blunstone

From lending Paul McCartney his family’s piano to write “I Want To Hold Your Hand” to discovering James Taylor and later staking his career on the future star, to later producing Linda Ronstadt and helping turn Laurel Canyon into a sound as well as a place, Peter Asher has earned a nickname in rock history: Everywhere Man.

Gratefully, the 82-year-old Asher loves to talk about his time as a performer, producer, manager, record company executive and A&R man. At an upcoming Tupelo Music Hall appearance he’ll tell stories and play songs he made with Peter & Gordon like “World Without Love” and “I Go To Pieces,” along with others he helped bring to life.

The Sept. 8 show touches on three separate rock eras: the 1960s British Invasion that Asher helped launch, and the rush of acts that came after, which included The Zombies; their lead singer, Colin Blunstone, is on the bill. Finally, New Wave is represented by The Fixx, who had hits like “Red Sky At Night” and “One Thing Leads To Another.”

As to how the trio of acts ended up touring together, Asher doesn’t have a tidy answer.

“We hope it fits,” he said. “It wasn’t my idea … by the time it reached me, someone was saying, ‘What do you think about this?’ and I went, ‘That sounds pretty cool — and odd.’” Rehearsals were due to start a few days after the interview.

Blunstone will play a solo set drawing on “She’s Not There,” “Time of the Season” and his early ’70s solo album One Year. The Fixx headlines, with the Reach the Beach catalog that made them MTV stars. Asher hasn’t seen them live until now. “I remember the records, and obviously the hits most of all,” he said. “I’m very excited about it.”

He and Blunstone have crossed paths, appearing on the same British television shows when both had hits in the ’60s, but this 19-date tour is their first together.

“I was a big fan of the Zombies,” Asher said. “Their songs are great, but also [Blunstone’s] voice is spectacularly good. I heard him sing not that long ago, and he sounded amazing.”

Asher’s set is divided between music and stories, the latter with plenty of sidebars.

“I often apologize for digressing too much on stage,” he said, but he receives the deference due to his vaunted history. “When I talk to the audience, they always kind of go, no, go ahead, digress — we’re interested.”

Some stories are never too old to tell, like the one about “You’ve Got a Friend,” famously poached from Carole King by James Taylor for Sweet Baby James after he saw her do it at L.A.’s Troubadour. Recently the story got an update, when King revealed that she’d written it in response to Taylor’s “Fire and Rain.”

“We had no idea,” Asher said, recalling the lyric that sparked King. “‘I’ve seen lonely times when I could not find a friend’ … Carole was basically saying, ‘No, you can find one. I’m here.’ Which changes the song immensely. When things like that happen, you go, ‘Wow, that’s a key improvement on the original story.’”

Peter & Gordon’s initial smash also makes for a fun yarn. McCartney wrote “World Without Love” solo and Lennon hated it. “John thought the opening line ‘Please lock me away’ was a ridiculous way to start a song, so I asked Paul if we could have it, and he said yes,” Asher recalled. “The Beatles were never going to record it.”

McCartney lived in the Asher family home at the time and was engaged to Peter’s sister Jane. Asher dismissed the idea that songs were a form of rent on his London room.

“They were fans of Lieber & Stoller, Mann & Weil, Goffin & King,” he said. “They didn’t think it was giving away songs … [it was] one of the roles they wanted to play.”

When Peter & Gordon’s first hit bumped “Can’t Buy Me Love” from the top of the charts, it delighted McCartney. “Eventually someone’s going to replace you at No. 1 because it’s an inevitable fact,” he told a journalist who’d asked if he was annoyed at being displaced. “It might as well be a song that you wrote. You’re still making money.”

Asher talks about moving to the U.S. solely based on his belief in an unknown Taylor — “I bet my career on James entirely with confidence” — and insisting, against the norms of the era, that Ronstadt’s own ideas about her music be taken seriously, rather than managed around.

The latter notion set Asher apart almost as much as his golden ear, and it helped give the world Heart Like A Wheel.

“She was allegedly ‘difficult’ for an artist, which only meant that she kind of insisted on things, or at least that her point of view and her ideas for a song be considered,” he said. “Some people thought it was their job to make those decisions for her … my instinct was that it was my job to make her decisions work.”

The Fixx, Colin Blunstone of The Zombies, and Peter Asher’s Songs & Stories
When: Tuesday, Sept. 8, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Tupelo Music Hall, 10 A St., Derry
Tickets: $75 and up at tupelohall.com

Featured photo: Courtesy photo.

The Music Roundup 26/09/03

• Country pair: As summer approaches its unofficial end, Red Daisy Revival performs outdoors in the Lakes Region. Led by married duo Morgan Clark and Daniel Kassel, the band began during the pandemic and became a love story. They play upbeat, affirming country songs like “The Me I Wanna Be,” which proclaims in positivity, “You don’t judge my story by the chapter you walked in on.” Thursday, Sept. 3, at 6:30 p.m., Kelley Park, 41 N. Main St., Bristol, reddaisyrevival.com.

• First Friday: A packed lineup of four local bands anchors a downtown party. Supernothing’s reggae rock provides a perfect excuse for wearing board shorts one more day. They kick things off in Bicentennial Square, followed by multi-genre organ trio J3ST. In front of the Statehouse, SuperBug offers “an energetic, hard-driving, funk-punk beat,” with Bosey Joe closing things out. Friday, Sept. 4, at 4 p.m., City Plaza & Bicentennial Square, Concord, firstfridayconcord.com.

• Riot grrrls: Vermont-based feminist punk rock band Burly Girlies top a raucous bill with Snake Lips, Milk St. and 7/11 Jesus. Fronted by singer Rae Murphy, who started the band in an Essex Junction basement with bass player Morgan Vespa a few years ago, Burly Girlies evoke artists like Bikini Kill, Hole and Mannequin Pussy, and organize the biannual Femme Fest in Burlington. Friday, Sept. 4, at 8 p.m., BAD BRGR, 1015 Elm St., Manchester, $10, burlygirlies.bandcamp.com.

• String thing: Multi-instrumentalists Gabrielle Macrae and Barry Southern perform as The Horsenecks at a brewery in Epsom known for its patronage of traditional music. According to their website, the Astoria, Oregon, duo’s sound “weaves through layers of influence that include early Appalachian stringband music, classic country, bluegrass and original folk,” with fiddle, guitar and banjo. Saturday, Sept. 5, 7 p.m., Blasty Bough Brewing, 3 Griffin Road, Epsom, horsenecks.net.

• Good cause: Feast on unlimited barbecue, bid on a bevy of raffle items and enjoy music from Chris Gendron at the second annual Country Cookout for Charity. Held at a brewery born from restaurateur Michael Buckley’s love for western living, the event is a fundraiser for Tunnels to Towers, an organization begun after 9/11 to provide services to Gold Star and first responder families. Sunday, Sept. 6, at noon, Lost Cowboy Brewing, 546 Amherst St., Nashua, $75 ($25/child), 600-6800.

They march to war

Wakeman is latest New London Barn NEST production

New London Barn Playhouse has long staged revivals of Chicago, Fiddler on the Roof, Oklahoma! and other classics in its 260-seat Main Street playhouse. Three years ago, it launched NEST, a program dedicated to new works. The latest opens Sept. 3, the world premiere of an original folk-rock musical set during the Civil War.

Wakeman is the true story of a 19-year-old New York woman who cut her hair, took a new name, and joined the Union Army. With words and music by singer-songwriter Jenn Grinels, it was selected for last year’s NAMT Festival of New Musicals and was a 2024 Kleban Prize finalist for lyrics. The Barn production will be its most fully realized.

The real Sarah Rosetta Wakeman enlisted in 1862 and served with the 153rd New York Infantry until dysentery killed her in 1864, with her fellow soldiers never learning her gender. Wakeman was one of an estimated 400 women believed to have served in disguise during the war.

She wrote regularly to her family, and her letters home survived in the book An Uncommon Soldier. Their tone surprised Grinels.

“We think of people in the Civil War writing in [a] romantic, descriptive, poetic way,” she said in a recent Zoom interview. “Sarah Rosetta Wakeman did not write like that.”

What she found instead, she said, was conversational and startlingly familiar. “This angsty teenager,” in Grinels’ words, asking her father, mother and sister for forgiveness, as she furtively pushed against gender expectations. “I loved seeing this much less idealized person … in full color, in all of their complicated, messy humanness.”

Rather than attempt “an emotional interpretation” of her life and travails,” Grinels was determined to let Wakeman’s words stand alone. “I want to hear their voice verbatim,” she said. So she built a spreadsheet that sorted phrases in every letter by category — money, family, self, military — and used “critical fabulation” to bridge the gaps.

Grinels’ score, drawing on bluegrass, Civil War-era song forms and contemporary Americana, remained remarkably stable through years of readings and workshops.

“I haven’t rewritten a song yet,” she said. A Stephen Sondheim maxim, “I hate writing the wrong song,” echoed in her head throughout the process.

What has changed frequently through readings is how Wakeman’s own words are woven into an actively theatrical show. In New London, movement and choreography will be added for the first time.

“Certainly a big … step forward,” Grinels said. “This is so much more ambitious than I was expecting.”

Wakeman found its way to New London after Managing Director Elliott Cunningham spotted it last fall at NAMT’s annual festival in New York City and quickly called Executive Director Keith Coughlin. I said, ‘I found our show for next year, it’s really that good,’” Cunningham recalled.

He and Coughlin then spent months courting Grinels, including a trip to her November concert at 54 Below in Manhattan, a favorite performance space for Broadway’s denizens, before finally persuading her to bring the show to New Hampshire. “It was basically just us bugging Jenn and saying, ‘Please come to New London,’” Cunningham said.

Wakeman bookends a season that began with Symphony New Hampshire performing Man of La Mancha, the latter part of a collaboration now in its third year. Along with NEST, it’s designed to give Barn audiences something new and different alongside the crowd-pleasing shows that fill the summer months.

For artists like Grinels, the new works program is a safe place to evolve their work. The Barn has a long history of doing just that, dating back to the late 1960s when Stephen Schwartz wrote drafts of his future smash Godspell while serving as Music Director for the summer stock season.

“Not to be cheeky, but the idea of the NEST is about being a place of support,” Coughlin said. “We take a lot of pride in the fact that our community has embraced it and that we can offer it to artists like Jenn to take this wonderful piece that has seen a lot of work already, and take it to its next step.”

Should Wakeman go on to win a Tony, New London Barn Playhouse can claim bragging rights for hosting its debut. The cast, made up of seasoned actors and led by Six the Musical touring company member Reese Cameron, is “phenomenal,” Coughlin insisted. That’s consistent with the Barn’s tradition of luring top talent to the bucolic town year after year.

“This is Broadway in your backyard, happening right here on Main Street in New London,” he said. “These are artists on the stage, behind the table and beyond the footlights that are top notch. I walked into the rehearsal room the other day and I’m just blown away by what’s being created.”

Wakeman – A New Folk-Rock Musical
When: Thursday, Sept. 3, and Friday, Sept. 4, 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, Sept. 5, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m.; Sunday, Sept. 6, 5 p.m.
Where: New London Barn Playhouse, 84 S. Main St., New London
Tickets: $50, ovationtix.com

Hope follows action

Singer-songwriter John Gorka performs in Manchester

Even if he’s performed since the late 1970s, winning the prestigious Kerrville New Folk Award in 1984 and coming up in the Greenwich Village Fast Folk Scene during that decade, John Gorka still feels a touch of nervousness every time he walks on stage.

“The only time I don’t … is if I’ve done a bunch of shows in a row and I’m too tired to be nervous,” Gorka said in a Zoom interview from his home in Minnesota. It means it still matters, he added. “Frank Sinatra said something about having nerves, he said that’s just a sign that you care.”

He’s still working the muscle he began to hone when the late Jack Hardy told him in 1979 that success comes from a schedule. “I told him, ‘I basically wait for inspiration to strike,’ and he said, ‘that’s a copout — you’ll come up with more songs quicker if you put the time in, even if you throw out three quarters of what you come up with.’”

On “Favorite Place,” a song that leads off his most recent album unentitled, Gorka mused on a process that’s “still mysterious and still calls me.” It’s about the joy he finds in the middle of writing, when he knows it’s going to be a song and it’s just a matter of getting all the details right. Throughout, Hardy’s admonition echoes.

“Hope follows action … you start out with showing up and going to work,” he said. “Hopefully, during the working on stuff, a spark of inspiration will come along that’ll fuel you for the rest of the time. These days, despair is not an option, so I’ve got to do something … then the hope will come.”

Gorka deftly manifests that feeling on a standout track from unentitled called “Particle & Wave.”

The song came in response to the 2018 March for Our Lives in Washington, D.C.

“Watching the coverage on CNN, a still small voice in my head said, ‘never stop believing there’s goodness in the world,’” Gorka recalled. “It was like, ‘OK, that sounds like the language of a song.’”

With lines like “Though justice seems to hesitate / It’s not too late,” he introduces it at concerts with a background story. More often, though, Gorka prefers to let audiences infer the meaning of his songs. Sometimes he’s surprised, like the time a woman told him “I Saw a Stranger With Your Hair” reminded her of a son she’d lost.

“I’d thought of it mainly as a romantic song, but that’s the way it hit her, and that’s why it meant something to her,” he said. “People will figure out what the song is about to them … you don’t want to put blinders on the listener by describing what it’s about too much or where it came from.”

The new record, his 10th for Red House Records, is Gorka’s first release in seven years, with some songs that date even further back.

“There were some things from a while ago that I started to record but never finished, some were new and some were old,” he said. “It was over a fairly long period of time.”

He hosts virtual songwriting workshops multiple times a year with Eliza Gilkyson — the next is in October — and one piece of advice he shares is that modest ambitions are best. “So you’re not trying to write a song for all mankind,” he said. “Set some limits and then work within those limits — and there’s an infinity even within those.”

Hardy and the habit of writing as a bedrock guide him.

“Clear a physical space, as well as your mind, then monitor the thoughts and images coming through,” he said. “For me, morning brain is the most productive. Before going to bed, that’s also a good time — because the song will keep playing through the day.”

As he sings on another great song from unentitled, “Stay until the night’s gone / Stay till you can dream again.”

John Gorka
When: Saturday, Aug. 29, 7:30 p.m.
Where: Rex Theatre, 23 Amherst St., Manchester
Tickets: $40 at palacetheatre.org

Featured photo: John Gorka. Photo by Robert Hakalski.

The Music Roundup 26/08/27

• Hip-harp: The penultimate Levitt AMP Manchester Music Series event has Küf Knotz & Christine Elise melding hip-hop and classical harp music. The unique duo formed almost accidentally, after Elise saw Knotz perform in a Philadelphia club, met him in a grocery store a few months later and offered her services. They fully improvised their first performance together. Thursday, Aug. 27, 6 p.m., Veterans Memorial Park, 723 Elm St., Manchester, facebook.com/ManchMusicNH.

• Song man: Indiana-born and now New York-based Benjamin Louis performs in one of the region’s most music-friendly venues. Louis’s November 2025 single “Yesterday Is Good” is a soulful slow burner that fans of Leon Bridges will love, and he just released Music, an EP described as focused “on the passage of time, the weight of age, the pursuit of passion, and the depths of desire.” Friday, Aug. 28, 7 p.m., Pembroke City Limits, 134 Main St., Suncook, linktr.ee/benjaminlouis.

• Double play: The Juggalo and horrorcore scene has a two-day moment as Leathal Weekend returns for the ninth time. This year’s lineup has Onyx, Bizarre of D12, Lil Eazy-E, and Fury on Day 1, followed on Day 2 by Esham, King Gordy, First Jason (a metal project led by Ari Lehman, the young Jason Voorhees in the original 1980 Friday the 13th) and Lyte. Friday, Aug. 28, and Saturday, Aug. 29, 7 p.m., Jewel Music Venue, 61 Canal St., Manchester, $50 and up, eventbrite.com.

• Lady laughs: Known for full-on charisma and zero filter from her tenure as a Daily Show correspondent, Dulcé Sloan is a powerhouse standup comic, as well as the author of Hello, Friends! Her 2024 memoir turns dating disasters and day-job chaos into entertaining reading (and listening — Sloan also narrates the audiobook). The brash, unapologetic comedian also hosted CW’s Great American Joke-Off. Saturday, Aug. 29, 8 p.m., BNH Stage, 16 S. Main St., Concord, $45, ccanh.com.

• Sunday best: The Shaker Village Music on the Green series continues with Caitlin Piper & Damian Bernardini. Piper is a Seacoast singer-songwriter who offers “sweet Jackson Browne swagger and Lake Street Dive sentimentality” on songs about love, resilience and connection. Bernardini is a stunningly talented guitarist who complements Piper with delicate yet complex lead riffs. Sunday, Aug. 30, 4 p.m., Canterbury Shaker Village,288 Shaker Road, Canterbury, shakers.org.

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